Anthony Wallace defined religion as belief and ritual concerned with supernatural beings, powers, and forces.
Another perspective on religion focuses on bodies of people who gather together regularly for worship, and who accept a set of doctrines involving the relationship between the individual and divinity, the supernatural, or whatever is taken to be the ultimate nature of reality.
Anthropologists have stressed the collective, shared, and enacted nature of religion, the emotions it generates, and the meanings it embodies.
Durkheim stressed religious effervescence, the bubbling up of collective emotional intensity generated by worship.
Victor Turner used the term communitas to refer to an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness.
Like ethnicity and language, religion also is associated with social divisions within and between societies and nations.
Religion is a cultural universal, although different societies conceptualize divinity, supernatural entities, and ultimate realities very differently.
Expressions of Religion
Neandertal burials and European cave paintings may be evidence of early religious activity.
Spiritual Beings
E. B. Tylor was the founder of the anthropology of religion.
Tylor proposed that religion evolved through three stages: first animism, then polytheism, and finally monotheism.
Animism was a belief in spiritual beings that, according to Tylor, originated from peoples' attempts to explain dreams and trances.
Polytheism is the belief in multiple gods.
Monotheism is the belief in a single, all-powerful deity.
Powers and Forces
Mana is a sacred impersonal force that can reside in people, animals, plants, and objects.
Belief in mana was especially prominent in Melanesia (the area of the South Pacific that includes Papua New Guinea and adjacent islands).
Melanesian mana, similar to our notion of efficacy or luck, could be acquired or manipulated by people in different ways, such as through magic.
One could acquire mana by chance, or by working hard to get it.
Because success was attributed to mana (and failure to a lack of mana), the notion of mana provided an explanation for differential success that people could not understand in ordinary, natural terms.
In Polynesia, mana was attached to political offices.
Polynesian chiefs and nobles had more mana than ordinary people did.
Chiefs were so charged with mana that contact with them, or with things they touched, was dangerous to commoners.
Consequently, the bodies and possessions of high chiefs were taboo—set apart as sacred and off-limits to ordinary people.
Magic and Religion
Magic refers to supernatural techniques intended to accomplish specific aims.
In imitative magic, magicians produce a desired effect by imitating it (e.g., the use of "voodoo dolls").
With contagious magic, whatever is done to an object is believed to affect a person who once had contact with it.
Magic can be associated with animism, mana, polytheism, or monotheism.
Uncertainty, Anxiety, Solace
Religion and magic can help reduce anxiety (e.g., facing death, enduring life crises).
Malinowski argued that people turn to magic as a means of control when they face uncertainty and danger.
The Trobriand Islanders turned to magic only in situations (e.g., sailing) that they could not control and that therefore were psychologically stressful.
In contemporary societies, magic persists as a means of reducing psychological anxiety in situations of uncertainty (e.g., baseball pitching).
Rituals
Rituals are formal—stylized, repetitive, and stereotyped—and performed in sacred places at set times.
Rituals include liturgical orders—sequences of words and actions invented prior to the current performance of the ritual in which they occur.
Rituals convey information about the participants and their traditions, and translate enduring messages, values, and sentiments into action.
Rituals are inherently social, and by participating in them, performers signal that they accept a common social and moral order.
Rites of Passage
Rites of passage are customs associated with the transition from one place or stage of life to another (e.g. Native American vision quests).
Rites of passage have three phases:
Separation—when participants withdraw from the group and begin moving from one place or status to another.
Liminality—the period between states, during which the participants have left one place or state but have not yet entered or joined the next.
Incorporation—when participants reenter society with a new status, having completed the rite.
Liminality involves the temporary suspension and even reversal of ordinary social distinctions, behaviors, and expectations.
Communitas refers to an intense community spirit, a feeling of great social solidarity, equality, and togetherness during collective liminality.
In certain societies, particularly nation-states, there are "permanent liminal groups" (e.g., sects, brotherhoods, cults) whose members adopt liminal features such as humility, poverty, equality, obedience, sexual abstinence, and silence.
Not all collective rites are rites of passage.
Most societies observe occasions on which people come together to worship, and in doing so, affirm or reinforce their solidarity. These are rites of intensification.
They demand collective adherence to the rules of ritual behavior and create emotions (the collective spiritual effervescence described by Durkheim).
Totemism
Rituals play an important role in creating and maintaining group solidarity.
Social solidarity was also promoted by totemism, which was important in Native Australian religions.
In totemic societies, each descent group had a totem—an animal, plant, or geographical feature—from which they claimed descent.
The members of a totemic group did not kill or eat their totem, except once a year when people gathered for ceremonies dedicated to the totem.
Totemism uses nature as a model for society.
People relate to nature through their totemic association with natural species.
Because each group has a different totem, diversity in the natural order becomes a model for diversity in the social order.
At the same time, because all totems are part of nature, the unity of the human social order is enhanced by symbolic association with and imitation of the natural order.
Social Control
The power of religion affects action.
Throughout history, political leaders have used religion to promote and justify their views and policies (e.g., the Taliban Movement in Afghanistan, which imposes an extreme form of social control through religious repression).
Leaders may mobilize communities, and thereby gain support for their own policies, either by persuasion or by instilling hatred or fear.
Witch hunts can be a powerful means of social control by creating a climate of danger and insecurity that affects everyone, not just the people who are likely targets.
They often take aim at people who can be accused and punished with least chance of retaliation.
Witchcraft accusations often are directed at socially marginal or anomalous individuals.
Witchcraft accusation may serve as a leveling mechanism, a custom or social action that operates to reduce status differences and thus to bring standouts in line with community norms—another form of social control.
To ensure proper behavior, religions offer rewards and punishments, and many prescribe a code of ethics and morality.
Kinds of Religion
Although religion is a cultural universal, religious beliefs and practices vary cross-culturally.
Wallace identified four types of religion: shamanic, communal, Olympian, and monotheistic.
Shamanic Religion
Shamans are religious figures (e.g., curers, mediums, spiritualists, astrologers, palm readers, diviners) who mediate between people and supernatural beings and forces.
Shamanic religions are most characteristic of foraging societies.
Shamans often set themselves off symbolically from ordinary people by assuming a different or ambiguous sex or gender role.
Communal Religion
Communal religions have shamans as well as community rituals such as harvest ceremonies and collective rites of passage.
Communal religions are polytheistic—that is, their adherents believe in several deities who control aspects of nature.
Although they are found in some foraging societies, communal religions are more typical of farming societies.
Olympian Religion
Olympian religions first appeared in states.
Such religions have full-time, professional priesthoods that are hierarchically and bureaucratically organized, like the state itself.
Olympian religions are polytheistic, characterized by pantheons of powerful anthropomorphic gods with specialized functions.
Monotheistic Religion
Like Olympian religions, monotheistic religions have priesthoods.
In monotheism, all supernatural phenomena are manifestations of, or are under the control of, a single eternal, omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent supreme being.
The term world-rejecting religion describes most forms of Christianity. The term refers to their tendency to reject the natural (mundane, ordinary, material, secular) world and to focus instead on a higher (sacred, transcendent) realm of reality.
World Religions
Christianity (with more than 2 billion members) and Islam (with 1.3 billion practitioners) are the two largest religions in the world today.
More than a billion people claim no official religion, but only about a fifth of them are self-proclaimed atheists.
Religion and Change
Like political organization, religion helps maintain social order. And, like political mobilization, religious energy can be harnessed not just for change, but also for revolution.
Revitalization Movements
Religious movements are social movements that occur in times of change, in which religious leaders emerge and undertake to alter or revitalize a society.
Christianity originated as a revitalization movement.
The colonial-era Iroquois reformation led by Handsome Lake is another example of a revitalization movement.
Cargo Cults
Cargo cults are revitalization movements that emerge when traditional communities have regular contact with industrial societies but lack their wealth, technology, and living standards.
Native communities attempt to explain European domination and wealth and to achieve similar success magically by mimicking European behavior and manipulating symbols of the desired life style.
The cargo cults of Melanesia and Papua New Guinea blended Christian doctrine with aboriginal beliefs and practices.
Cargo cults take their name from their focus on cargo—European goods that have been brought to the region by cargo planes and ships.
Because of their experience with big-man systems, Melanesians believed that all wealthy people eventually had to give their wealth away.
Cargo cults emerged as a means of magically leveling Europeans, who refused to distribute their wealth or even to let natives know the secret of its production and distribution.
Cargo cults paved the way for unified political action through which indigenous communities eventually regained their autonomy.
Secular Rituals
Ritual-like behavior can occur in secular contexts.
If the distinction between the supernatural and the natural is not consistently made in a society (e.g., the Betsileo view witches and dead ancestors as real people), it can be difficult to define what constitutes religion and what does not.
The behavior considered appropriate for religious occasions varies tremendously from culture to culture.
Anthropology Today: France Celebrates Foremost Anthropologist of Religion
During the last week of November 2008, France celebrated the 100th birthday of Clause Lévi-Strauss.
Father of a school known as structural anthropology and a key figure in the anthropology of religion (especially myth and folklore), Lévi-Strauss is known for his many theoretical books and his studies of Native Americans in lowland South America.
This story also describes the Musée du Quai Branly, which contains many artifacts that Lévi-Strauss collected. The Musée is a tribute to the arts, beliefs, and cosmology of non-Western peoples.
This story also suggests a more prominent public role for anthropology in France than in the United States.
